Now the media are just taunting us with their tall tales about Stephen Paddock, the alleged Las Vegas shooter. Reputedly serious news organizations are claiming that he made a living playing video poker. That's like claiming someone made a living smoking crack.

The media are either doing PR for the gambling industry or they don't want anyone considering the possibility that Paddock was using gambling to launder money.

NBC News reports, with a straight face: "Las Vegas gunman earned millions as a gambler." A Los Angeles Times article is headlined, "In the solitary world of video poker, Stephen Paddock knew how to win." The story says that Paddock's gambling "was at least a steady income over a period of years."

I don't know all the ins and outs of Paddock's life, but that's a lie.

How do reporters imagine casino owners make a living? Any ideas on how all those glorious lobbies, lights, pools and fountains are paid for? How do they think Sheldon Adelson and Steve Wynn became billionaires if gambling is a winning proposition for people like Paddock -- and therefore, by definition, a losing proposition for the casinos?

The media think about money the way Democrats do. They have absolutely no conception of where it originates. Those casino owners sure are generous! reporters think to themselves. Economist Thomas Sowell is always ridiculing journalists for not understanding basic economics. It turns out, they don't understand the spreadsheet of a lemonade stand.

The New York Times explained that the "top" video poker machines pay out 99.17 percent. That's great that Paddock was only losing cents on the dollar (if true), but it's still losing. The Times quickly explained that he could have more than made up his losses with all the "comps" -- the free rooms, meals and "50-year-old port that costs $500 a glass," as his brother Eric said.

AD FEEDBACK

Gamblers who are beating the house are not given $500 glasses of port. Refer to the profit/loss spreadsheet. And yet, according to his brother, Paddock was treated like royalty by the casinos. Which means he was losing.

Apart from outright theft, the only way to have an advantage over the casino is by card-counting. That's not cheating and it doesn't guarantee a win. It merely allows the gambler to make a more educated guess as each card is played, thereby tilting the odds ever so slightly in his favor. Still, if the casinos suspect a customer is counting cards, he will be promptly escorted off the premises.

And counting cards only helps with blackjack. Paddock's game of choice was VIDEO POKER. That's a computer! It's programmed to ensure the house wins. Not all the time, but at least often enough to make casino owners multibillionaires. Anyone who plays video poker over an extended period of time will absolutely, 100 percent, by basic logic, end up a net loser.

So why are the media insistent that Paddock was getting rich by playing video poker?

I don't know what happened -- and, apparently, neither do the cops -- but it's kind of odd that we keep being told things that aren't true about the Las Vegas massacre, from the basic timeline to this weird insistence that Paddock made a good living at gambling.

The most likely explanation is that the reporters and investigators are incompetent nitwits. But the changing facts from law enforcement and preposterous lies from the press aren't doing a lot to tamp down alternative theories of the crime.

Among the questions not being asked by our wildly incurious media:

Why would Paddock unload 200 rounds into the hallway at a security guard who was checking on someone else's room before beginning his massacre?

How can it possibly take eight days to figure out when the alleged shooter checked into the hotel?

Why was Paddock wearing gloves if he was about to commit suicide?

Have any other solitary mass shooters ever had girlfriends?

If Paddock wasn't making money on video poker -- and he wasn't -- why would he be cycling millions of dollars through a casino, turning every dollar into, at best, 99 cents?

Maybe Paddock enjoyed video poker. But if the allegedly serious media are going to keep telling us he was making a living doing it, they're just begging us to say that losing a percent or two on millions of dollars doesn't make sense as an investment strategy, but it does make sense as a money laundering operation.

And the probable illicit business requiring money to be laundered that leaps out at us in Paddock's case is illegal gun sales. If true, it would not only explain the arsenal in his hotel room, but also raises the possibility of either an accomplice or different perpetrator altogether.

If this were a movie script, a terrorist would go to Paddock's room on the pretense of buying guns, kill Paddock, commit the massacre, put his gunshot residue-covered gloves on Paddock's dead hands and slip out of the room when the coast was clear.

According to the all-new timeline given by the Las Vegas police -- pending a third revision -- this is at least possible. The hallway was empty, except for a bleeding security guard down by the elevators, for at least two minutes after the shooting stopped. The stairwell was clear for more than half an hour. It also explains the gloves.

There's no evidence for any of this, but on the other hand, there's no evidence for the version the media are giving us. At least the movie script version doesn't require us to pretend that Paddock was making "millions" from video poker.

I'm offering an 8 DVD seminar on how YOU can get rich through video poker. I will teach YOU all the secrets of video poker pros that the casino "fat cats" don't want YOU to know, for only $2,000 if you buy within 30 minutes after this poast is made.

Date: October 11th, 2017 6:05 PMAuthor: Thanks Mario! But our partner is in another castle ()

JFC. If there was ACTUALLY a community of hundreds to thousands people making millions playing video poker, the casinos would patch the software overnight or just remove the goddamn machines. If someone found some sort of glitch in the software that allowed consistent winning, he wouldn't be spreading the secret to his bros on the internet.

idk, everything I'm reading right now says you're probably wrong. The best machines seem to be a thing of the past, and even then the best, full time professionals weren't making the type of money Paddock was.

Best people seem to top out around $100k, maybe more twenty years ago when the machines were better. The issue is the best odds tend to be on lower-bet machines, and there's only so many hours in a day to slurp up that 100.7% playing hand after hand.

This is not representative of anything and should not form the basis of your opinion. But to address the point, the people who make that much play with a lot more money than what they talk about on that forum.

Cool, well let me know if you have any kind of source. The issue seems to be that the higher bet machines don't pay out as well, so I'm not sure you're right. I've only done half an hour of googling so I'm not making any conclusions.

Also, understand vast majority of gamblers are not publicly open about results of operations/ many live private pseudo criminally minded lifestyles and therefore there will be no reliable sources on the topic.

Date: October 11th, 2017 7:52 PMAuthor: Thanks Mario! But our partner is in another castle ()

CR. There are like 40 casinos on the Vegas strip. If you had a "casino of the week" and went there for five days and cashed out a profit of $1,000 five times a day, you'd be far too small of a fish for anybody to notice. You wouldn't even need to talk to a person; the machines that convert vouchers to cash are programmed to handle this "small" amount. Buy in with $100, cash out each time you get to $1,100, buy in for $100 again, etc. until you have your profit for the day and walk out the door. Don't make a spectacle of yourself.

Nobody will even notice you. To the extent anybody does, you're just another faggot tourist who was at the casino for a few days before going "home." Move on to casino 2 after a few days, then casino 3, etc. By the time casino 1 is on the rotation again, you'll be long forgotten-- shit, a lot of the employees will be different from the last time you were there and the remaining ones have seen tens of thousands of people since then.

And just like that you are raking in a ton of cash without anybody really noticing or caring. Pay taxes on the money, write "Gambler" as your occupation and the gov't won't care either.

Date: October 11th, 2017 6:36 PMAuthor: bloodacre roasting on an open fire (bloodacre@aol.com)

Not until you start losing again.

My buddy has a serious gambling addiction. Has personal hosts or whatever at every casino in AC and Vegas. We went to Vegas for his bachelor party and stayed at Encore.

Apparently last time he went he made out with like $20k playing blackjack. They wouldn't comp shit for him for his bachelor party. On the phone the host even brought up exactly how much he walked away with last time and noted that he hadn't spent a significant time at the tables since we arrived.

wait, suppose he really did make millions investing in apartment buildings. if he's an aspie quant-obsessed guy, he could play poker video all day and lose on average $500. he could do that for years on end.

Some people are saying that he reported millions in winnings as income on his taxes. I'm not sure if that's true. I thought he made his millions booming in real estate.

I could see how maybe some non-tax mastermen journalists could get confused. You report all of your winnings as income but then report all of your losses in your deductions. So it could look like you had several million in gambling income if you didn't bother looking at the deductions. I'm guessing this is what happened.

I'm just a guy who's spent a little time reading about video poker pros for purposes of poasting ITT, but it seems like there at least were some dudes who were doing roughly that. It was only on certain machines, and only when the jackpot got to a certain level, and they tended to be quarter bet machines.

Not 30 SD, but the "community" of people doing this in the nineties professionally was apparently double digits, so still serious outliers which is why they were able to do it for a while without much attention. Because the machines were low bets, they could only grind out low six figures even doing it full time and keeping track of where the right machines were.

he and his family were investing in building and apartments since the 80s...i have seen an accounting of his purchases...he really made his big money via a purchase of a rather large apartment complex in the metroplex area, which he ran and operated himself...and he funded that by the sale of an apartment complex in LA....and he funded THAT by teaming up with his family and buying and refurbishing homes in socal...these people were miserly savers and workers...nothing secretive here, just hard work over decades and lucky timing

he didn't start gambling and drinking until he sold the DFW area complex in 2014...he made millions off that deal...

and he and his entire family were/are misers, literally. Second hand clothes etc....just like me!

and he was a skilled gambler who knew how to minimize his losses and even made up for them with comped rooms and food....my theory is that the booze warped his mind, drove him into a depression...booze really is poison!

It's not risky if you study video poker like a true aspie, which Paddock did. Basically guaranteed to retain 99% of your money, which sounds like a good return on a laundering scheme. Easier than operating some cash business and cooking the books or whatever, especially if you actually enjoy doing it and thousands in sushi, COMPED.

Fuckin lol at the casino operator up thread trying to convince people that COMMUNITIES OF PEOPLE make millions playing against a casino-owned computer (then get comped tens of thousands of dollars worth of sushi)